1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication network, and more specifically, to authenticating users in such a communication network.
2. Background
In typical communication network applications, such as online games, players may interact and communication with partners and virtual worlds during the online experience. The effectiveness of the experience can be important to the player, who may have many choices of online games and other activities. The effectiveness of the experience is also important to online game providers in retaining players to be engaged in the games offered by the providers.
Players of the online games typically setup accounts on various service, or game, providers. The accounts are used, for example, to maintain profiles of the user, game statistics, buddy lists, and the like. In order to maintain integrity of the user's account, a user typically needs to use a password to authenticate themselves and to gain access their accounts. Use of passwords at the various service providers requires the player to remember account and password information for each of the service providers. As the player uses more and more service providers maintenance of many passwords can be a burden to the player.
To maintain a quality of play, game providers may wish to restrict access to authenticate player, for example players that have specific game consoles. By limiting access to specific game consoles the game provider has confidence that the player's interaction with the game is consistent across multiple players and multiple titles. For example, a game provider may not want a player to use a personal computer (PC) to play a game that was designed to be player with a specific game console. While limiting a players access in this way may maintain a desired level of quality it may also be burdensome to the user to limit access to their accounts in this way. For example, if a player only wants to check for messages from his buddies they may not be able to because they do not have access to the required game console at that time.
Thus, there is a need for improving authentication of users that access a communication network.